Instagram is one of the more popular social media networks these days. For one thing, people are seemingly tired of Facebook while Twitter appears to be a gathering place for outspoken discourse and opinions.

Naturally, a lot of bloggers and website owners would like to know how to drive Instagram traffic to their blogs, preferably without spending a dime in the process.

I started using Instagram, seriously and for business purposes, about a year ago. Before that I used to share pictures of whatever caught my fancy and that’s the good news. Because Instagram must be used that way. It’s among the more social of the sharing platforms.

When I launched my business in March, 2018, I didn’t realise that a good deal of my target audience hung out on Instagram. And over time, consistently, I’ve observed that Instagram users are the ones who will do the following:

a) Read my posts/ comment on them

b) Send me queries regarding my services

c) Subscribe to my blog’s newsletter.

It seemed foolish to not tap into the potential of this channel when it was able to send so much value my way. Over time, I have cut back on other social media channels (which do send targeted traffic to some extent) and begun to focus more of my energy on Instagram.

There was only one problem. (Make that two, actually).

A) Instagram allows only one place to place links and that’s in your profile or bio. I couldn’t directly drive traffic to different blog pages or a services page using Instagram’s single link in the profile/bio, the way I could with Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest.

B) I have very few followers which means I can’t use the ‘Swipe up’ feature within Instagram stories, available only to verified accounts or those with over 10k followers.

What I originally did: Set up a Linktree account

The easiest alternative, especially when I didn’t want to spend money at this point of time, was to create an account with Linktr.ee

Linktr.ee is pretty awesome, since it allows you to create a custom link and then add multiple links, like a tree, to your bio.

For a long time, this worked great, especially since updating links on Linktr.ee is a one-click process.

But, over time, I realised something. People were clicking on the linktree links and then heading to my blog.

And this meant that instead of directing traffic to my blog from Instagram, I was sending traffic first to linktr.ee, which wasn’t really helping my cause.

Linktree Alternative: How I set up a landing page for Instagram

That’s when I stumbled upon the idea for a stand-alone landing page on my blog, that would be exclusively for those who were coming to my blog from Instagram.

It would mean a bit of setting up and for that, I’d need an hour with Canva, but that was it!

As you can see from the image below, I used the Linktr.ee interface as a guide to set up my own version of Linktr.ee on my blog.

There were a few advantages to doing this.

i) People were now landing directly on my blog, instead of a third-party platform. That means the bounce rate for my traffic from Instagram improved significantly and the traffic via Instagram went up by 3850% as compared to the previous period! (See image below)

ii) With Linktr.ee , I had a single link to all the latest posts on my blog. Of course, you can manually update each link when it goes live on the blog, but I came up with a simpler solution.

Instead of having a link to the entire blog, I now had a link to each main category of posts that I wrote on the blog. Thus, I had parenting posts, blogging tips and productivity hacks, all on the same page. 🙂

iii) People are more prone to hang around the blog and click around when it’s a landing page than when they have to go back to linktr.ee each time.

iv) More people signed up for my newsletter, even when they came looking for a blog post, because I was giving them direct access to my free resource library on the landing page. Neat, huh? 🙂

*Watch the detailed Canva video tutorial below on how I set up my landing page, so you can do this for yourself too.

The creators of an app similar to Canva- called Desygner- have come up with an easy-to-use format for how you can add multiple links in your Instagram bio.

Read their detailed tutorial here. (Sponsored link)